Caption: Yuri Gagarin's birthplace. Historical image of the house in which the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968, right) was born. Gagarin made the first manned space flight on 12 April 1961 when he orbited the Earth once in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, a flight that lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes. He later returned to active service as a test pilot, dying in a crash during a training flight in 1968. That year Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin, in his honour. Photographed in Klushino, Gzhatsk District, Smolensk Region, Russia, on 1st May 1961.